It was shortly after the year 2005 when the ailing Mubarak fell victim to the spell of Sharm El-Sheikh, the coastal city in South Sinai about 510km from Cairo, abandoning domestic affairs to his domineering wife Suzanne Thabet and their over ambitious youngest son, Gamal. Mubarak gave in to his doctors' advice and went to take in the fascinating and beautiful landscape, the sea breeze and wafts of virgin air in the evening, and comfortable temperatures as a way of remembering the high points and heroic achievements of his 50 year career, which started when his bid to join the Air Force Academy was approved. Sharm El-Sheikh also fired up the besotted admirer's memory about his first day in the presidential palace when his predecessor Anwar Sadat selected him his Vice President. Regardless of the great environment surrounding him, and the tight security in the area – which was so tight not even a fly could sneak around – the old man was still haunted by the tragic memory of Islamists assassinating his President during a military parade on October 6, 1981. Mubarak's fears were also nourished by a failed assisination attempt on his own life that was also carried by Islamists in 1995 after arriving in the Ethiopian capital to participate in an African summit. Although his powerful men and cronies in Cairo organised a hero's welcome to raise his morale, Mubarak realised just how lethal his battle with the Islamists would be – his became a life of costantly avoiding an unnatural, premature means of death. The President would furiously grit his teeth whenever his intelligence officiers failed a mission or had to apologise for failing to arrest suspected assassins or the masterminds behind assination plots when breaches were detected in places like London, the US and Sudan. The Egyptian president's dismay worsened when his alleged Western allies (the US White House and their British counterparts) took in the very Islamists who were involved in the attempt on his life. These supposed allies deliberately ignored his advice about the idiocy of allowing a very poisonous snake (Islamists) to slither across a snake charmer's bare chest (Western allies) merely to entertain an idiot audience – and, of course, the vipor sunk its fangs into the charmer's chest on 9/11. Not only did Mubarak's recollection of all these events spoil what should have been a relaxing gaze across a vast sea and mountainous landscapes in Sharm El-Sheikh, but he was also pissed off by much ingratitude showed by the majority of the Egyptian people, the poor and the low-income, towards his economic reforms. Extraordinary weapon He could not resist suspicions that the ever-increasing population was deliberately arranged to oppose his economic development goals and cause him embarrassment. He thought that his local foes (Islamists) were using fertility rates among poor people in rundown areas, slums and hamlets across the nation as an extraordinary weapon to frustrate his economic ambitions. Inspite of making several national appeals to manage family size more contientiously, Mubarak's advise went unheaded because Islamists were preaching an opposite message. Accordingly, Mubarak's fury in this respect would be ridiculed day and night. More curious is the fact that birth control campaign on TV, backfired; obstinate husbands would order their children to bed immediately in the evening and not to make a stir while dad and mum were shut up in their room. Idle men would find it easy to invade their wives aggressively and unemotionally to release their frustration. The aging president, who only has two sons, must have become more frustrated when nutritionists and gynecologists failed to make a link between poverty and fertility. The moans and groans of poor, unemployed parents were audibe to Washington and the EU, which was interpreted as a cue that it was time to oust a president because he was no longer responsive to the new rules of the game. Physical proximity with Israeli friends Mubarak's physical proximity to his Israeli friends, he inherited from his predecessor, Sadat, unleashed cynical thoughts about him being pro-Israel at the expense of the Palestinian people. Cynics suspected that the family, in collaboration with the president's powerful men in Cairo, had put the aging president under house arrest, fearing that, the President was tenaciously holding on to life and his presidency, in spite of two critical surgeries in Germany in 2004 for a slipped disc and the removal of his gall bladder and a growth on the small intestine in March 2010. Mubarak also slipped into comas several times, one of which came unavoidably to the knowledge of the lukewarm public as he was giving the inaugural speech in the People's Assembly. Mubarak's wife had fears that his tenacity to rule would impede her overwhelming title-changing dream from the First Lady to the Mother of the President. His stay in Sharm El-Sheikh made a stir that his wife and son had decided to put the expired president under a kind of home arrest. (To be continued)
